I work in an elementary school where the administration and teachers may be interested in communicating with parents over the Internet.

I was thinking Google would be the best way to do this – but since a good number of parents have minimal to zero computer experience in this area, I thought it would be easiest if the school would set up the Gmail accounts for them.

I have done some scripting in the past – and it always takes me a long, long time to write a reliable script.

Is there any chance a free or inexpensive tool exists that would help me create multiple Gmail (or even Hotmail) accounts given a spreadsheet containing the relevant information for creating a new login ?

Well, the law and ethics of this are more complicated. If your organziation owns a domain it will be able to create a Google apps account, and the admin of this account will be able to create accounts for other people. The procedure is still manual but relatively simple.

an email account is one's personal.... No one is supposed to create any email account for others... Its js illegal!!! Obviously millions of fake accounts are created every day and you can create thousands of it but there is no such script to bypass the captcha.... It is applied to detect if the account creator is a human or a bot.... So never try for it and if your institution thinks of it, stop it...

Oron

May 5, 2012 at 10:53 pm

You can't, and you shouldn't.

Google uses a captcha system (which requires a human to identify some deformed text and type it in) specifically to foil automatic account creation systems.

Ethically, this is a really bad idea. You are essentially wanting to create an online identity for them, but these parents are not "yours". You could equally be described as stealing their identities. I understand you want to do this for all the right reasons, but nevertheles, consider this: you create the accounts, and of course, you create paswords for them all. You will then end up with a copy of the passwords which will give you access to all these people's emails! Worse yet, if someone stole the list from you, *they* would have access to all those parents' accounts.

It only takes a few minutes to create an email account if you know how to do it, so I would suggest that you create a simple instruction sheet showing parents how to create an account on GMail, and hand it out to them. It will give them the power to create the account, or indeed not to, if that's what they want.
Best of luck!